As one of the 40 percent of Americans who makes New Year’s resolutions, in January I started going to a local gym three times a week. Wanting to stay active during Chicago’s long winter, I soon saw those lectures about the benefits of exercise from my dad—a former Marine with the health of a marathon runner—bear out. I felt energized and refreshed. I slept better. Stresses from the workday melted away as I jogged, stretched, and laughed out loud at Seinfeld reruns to boot. I found myself thanking God for making our bodies capable of tremendous strength and grace. Exercise became another facet of glorifying him.
For a while, at least.
Then the counting began. The gym is typical fare for Western-style health centers: an affordable private chain, it aims to make the gym experience personalized, pain-free, and highly measurable. For every step taken on the treadmill and every rotation on the elliptical, digitized numbers tell you how far, how long, how fast the pace and heartbeat, which body parts used, and, of course, how many calories gone.
For a Type A, task-oriented person like me, watching those burnt calories stack up felt like progress, like a sweaty checkmark of accomplishment. And it made me—who, medically speaking, does not need to lose weight and does not struggle with overeating—want to burn more calories each time, often with no “that’s enough” in sight. If the numbers ever stopped motivating, then copies of Shape, Women’s Health, and Self were readily available at the front desk to make sure I didn’t forget the goal.
Predictably, I began thinking in terms of caloric merits and demerits, as eating became a necessary (though, thankfully, usually enjoyable) activity that counteracted my gym achievements. Fixing brown rice and steamed vegetables for dinner was to keep on the straight and narrow; choosing the cupcake or brownie at a party was a failure of nerve and soul. The fitness-and-healthy-eating routine became a way to gauge my spiritual health—a way to congratulate myself for being a “good girl.”
The health-food and weight-loss industries know the power of adding morality into their often-contradictory messages, overwhelmingly aimed at women. Jean Kilbourne, who has written extensively on advertising’s effects on women, notes an ad in her book Can’t Buy My Love that epitomizes how we think in “good food / evil food” terms. It shows a chocolate sundae on one side of the page and a low-calorie shake on the other. The sundae is labeled “temptation,” while the shake is labeled “salvation.” Another ad, for lean pork, features the tag, “We lead you to temptation but deliver you from evil.”
Yet confusingly, advertisers also goad us on to indulge in guilty pleasures, to deal with stress, bad relationships, and loneliness by treating ourselves with delectable sins (the entire branding mechanism of Haagen Dazs and Dove Chocolates).
Michelle Lelwica, a religion professor at Concordia College in Minnesota, says this kind of advertising oils the wheels of what she has named “the religion of thinness.” In a post for Psychology Today, she writes, ” … the promise of a ‘born-again’ body [is] part of a broader societal network of beliefs, myths, rituals, and moral codes that encourage us to find ‘salvation’ (i.e., happiness, health, and fulfillment) through the quest for a better (read: thinner) body …. [I]t has many of the features of traditional religion, even though it fails to deliver the salvation it promises and sadly shortchanges the spiritual needs to which it appeals.” This religion’s underlying creed—”I will be happier when I’m thinner”—is pervasive in the U.S., where eating disorders afflict 7 million women and 1 million men, and where, according to one study, 42 percent of 9- and 10-year-old girls say they are trying to lose weight.
How is a Christian to avoid the religion of thinness, the idol that says happiness is found not ultimately in God but in getting a small waist? You won’t find me downplaying the benefits of eating healthily, exercising routinely, and getting good sleep. Nor will you hear me saying that laziness, overeating, and gluttony (the latter being as much about self-indulgence and control as about too much food—you can indulge with rice crackers) are not sins. God loves and cares about our bodies, as he has made them temples of his Spirit and said he will raise them one day, just as he did Jesus’ body (1 Cor. 6:14-20).
But, as we enter the season of Lent, a time when Christians worldwide fast to remember their hunger for God, I find myself compelled to take up another spiritual discipline: forgoing calorie counting at the gym and dinner table. For me, the habit is a scrupulous way to establish that I’m a “good person” rather than someone in desperate need of the salvation that being thin can’t offer. And it often turns mealtime into a chore instead of an enjoyment and occasion for praise. Fasting, after all, is not about avoiding something bad; it is about giving up something good—and only for a time—in order to remember who made it good in the first place. Fasting prepares us for the marriage supper with the Lamb, which I take to mean an actual, embodied feast, not just a spiritual metaphor.
Here’s to hoping that by giving up the calorie count—and the religion of thinness that it so easily leads to—I regain a gratitude for bodies, food, and the God who blesses both.
